Drug Enforcement Administration Hiring Ebonics Translators

Calling SoCal's's own Snoop Dogg: If the rap game doesn't pan out, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has a job for you. It's looking for Ebonics translators.

That's right. It turns our that when some DEA agents hear suspects say stuff on tape and in person, they get those question-mark bubbles over their heads and need to have stuff translated. Apparently, despite being the world's most well-trained, well-equipped anti-drug army, yay-yo is a still foreign term to the administration. According to The Smoking Gun, Ebonics is one of 114 languages the DEA needs help with:

The Department of Justice is seeking to hire linguists fluent in Ebonics to help monitor, translate, and transcribe the secretly recorded conversations of subjects of narcotics investigations, according to federal records.

A maximum of nine Ebonics experts will work with the Drug Enforcement Administration's Atlanta field division, where the linguists, after obtaining a "DEA Sensitive" security clearance, will help investigators decipher the results of "telephonic monitoring of court ordered nonconsensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media."

Dennis Romero has worked on staff at several magazines and newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian, and, as a
young stringer, the New York Times.